Getting To Be The Decider

This week my main work was to make some decisions. Just writing that it doesn’t sound like much. But these were decisions that I had been considering for quite a while, so they were the culmination of a lot of mental work.

First, I decided I will use the current format of sections for my Chasing Wisdom Blog-Zine through June. Starting in July I will change the format to be more focused on creativity, personal growth, and authentic living. In my framework of Why? What? How? it’s going to be focused on Why?

Why? is about purpose, the reasons we want to change and try a different path. What? is the change we decide to make or the new path we decide to follow. How? is the way we make it happen, the detailed steps we follow and pieces of information we gather to make our What become real so we can honor our Why.

On The Twisting Road, my e-mail newsletter (e-zine), will be focused more on What? and How? The articles and tips will be more practical and more action-oriented than Chasing Wisdom.

I have been posting articles to my Anything But Marketing! blog on a weekly basis. I realized I don’t intend to do that long-term. I usually post ideas based on conversations with fellow coaches and service professionals. I will post weekly when I can, but eventually I will compile the articles into a larger information product and pull down the blog. It’s a useful way for me to gather a variety of ideas for the future. I will include the ABM! posts in the newsletter whenever I have a new one.

On The Twisting Road will be published weekly on a regular basis, with occasional extra issues for special events or product announcements as I develop them. I have gone back and forth, and forth and back, trying to balance my preference for a focused newsletter with my preference for not publishing it so often it becomes annoying. I am on newsletter lists where I receive multiple issues in a week. Too often I find myself getting annoyed by multiple newsletter issues per week. I am most pleased with newsletters that arrive on a weekly or semi-weekly basis. As a result of my completely unscientific research of a non-representative sample – me – I chose to have a weekly publishing format.

I will publish Chasing Wisdom monthly. I have been posting a section per week, for a total of four sections per month. That was a way to have weekly content for my newsletter: There’s a new section of my Blog-Zine posted! Since the newsletter has its own content and will be targeted a little differently, I can write Chasing Wisdom over the course of the month and publish it in a day or two.

Another decision I made was the format for my new business cards. I’ve been planning the new ones since I started passing out the current ones. I have streamlined my card to web address, e-mail address, and phone number. It’s applicable to my business as a writer, trainer, information publisher, and coach… because it doesn’t mention any specific job! I’m looking forward to learning what it’s like to pass them out, and to finding out how they will be received.

I clarified my decision not to focus on parent coaching. I realized I am passionate about healthy child development, especially psychological development, but not passionate about parents’ struggles. I think I will focus on training teachers and caregivers and coaching people who supervise them instead of coaching parents. I may offer parent training, if I find a market that will pay, but I will limit my coaching around promoting healthy child development to people who are also passionate about it and wanting to learn and grow in their abilities and understanding.

Whenever I take my sons to the bookstore, I’ve been reading Eckart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (Oprah's Book Club, Selection 61). It’s somewhat scholarly so I’m taking my time with it. I try to follow along as he writes about “awareness” that brings people out of “unconsciousness” and helps to overcome the “ego.” To understand him I have to use a different system – Carl Jung’s personality theory, which is also complex and esoteric.

Tolle’s book gives me hope in this way: if he can have a successful career writing such cumbersome books about profound philosophical and spiritual ideas, and even train groups and provide individual counseling on them, I can probably have a successful coaching and training business that includes excursions into deeper purposes along with practical steps to improvement.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Is This Blog My New Weekly E-zine?

This week on Tuesday and Thursday I was listening to Alexandria Brown’s last free teleseminar on e-zines. It was kind of a big deal, because she’s the E-zine Queen.

The Tuesday night call was a free course on latest methods and techniques for getting the best results from an e-mail newsletter, or e-zine (electronic magazine). Thursday night there were five or six people (I left the call early so I’m not sure) who use Ali’s ideas and were talking about their results.

The recordings of the calls are available through her blog, the first link above. The Tuesday call is worth downloading and listening to. Thursday’s was more testimonial but there were some specific ideas I heard for people wanting better results from an e-mail newsletter.

I was listening Tuesday night and not hearing much new at first, but suddenly I grabbed a notebook and started taking lots of notes. Ali was giving a lot of “how-tos” and “why-tos” and that sort of thing – specific, useful information.

Then she told us one of the biggest mistakes people make when they decide to start an e-zine is to try to put too much content into each issue. It becomes such a big task they can only publish monthly. She said that’s a bad idea.

Ouch!

My goal has been to publish monthly issues of Chasing Wisdom. I wanted to have several sections and lots of content. Ali recommended taking that much content and breaking it down into one idea per week. That reminded me I initially planned to post one section per week until a month’s issue was fully posted. I haven’t followed that plan, focusing more on getting a month’s issue posted on time.

She was also talking about ways to get more people to opt-in to the e-mail list to get the e-zine. Now there’s where my plan seems to have a huge hole. You don’t have to sign up for my newsletter to get my information. The articles are posted on the web. My newsletter just basically says, “Hey, everybody! My articles are posted!”

On Wednesday I got The Wednesday Minute, which is actually several minutes these days. Alex Mandossian was talking about how he uses a “squeeze page” to get people to give their e-mail address when they navigate to his blog page. It’s a somewhat clever idea, though I’m not sure of the value of an e-mail address given in this way.

But these things got me thinking. (Yikes!) First, I need a weekly e-mail newsletter. Second, I like writing articles for Chasing Wisdom. Third, I don’t think a newsletter that goes out weekly to say, “Hey, another section of my blog-zine is posted” will be very valuable to my business long-term.

I haven’t figured this all out yet. However, I realized that I post here weekly, and I post to my Anything But Marketing! blog weekly. I chart my own journey here, so it’s a record of my discoveries, challenges, struggles, and successes transitioning to a new career. Since I want to work with people discovering and transitioning to creative careers, this information could be useful. The ideas for “telling your story” in Anything But Marketing! are simple and practical. Sounds like an e-mail newsletter to me!

I’m trying to figure out how to integrate or re-arrange or Frankenstein what I’m already doing into a weekly or twice-weekly e-mail newsletter. I really like the idea of having past issues archived on the web, so maybe I’ll post things to my newsletter and then a week or so later archive them. The advantage to signing up would be getting the information earlier.

I might consolidate my blogs to one site by making them sub-pages of a designated site. Haven’t figured that out yet. Obviously, if and when I do make that kind of change, I’ll put it in my newsletter and post it here!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey